HYRULE (THE LEGEND OF ZELDA SERIES)

Hyrule has certainly been through the wringer over the course of the Zelda franchise, and taken many different forms over the years. One thing that’s never changed, however, is that Hyrule never fails to suck players right in. From the flooded world of The Wind Waker to the desolate post-apocalypse of Breath of the Wild, Hyrule has provided countless memorable moments that earn it a place on this list.

In case it’s not clear, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are really great. Now, they owe most of this to the simple fact that they’re incredibly straightforward and faithful to a fault 1:1 translations of the originals; but those fifteen year old originals still remain near the top of this series’ outings, so simply by bringing them over almost as is to the Switch, we end up with an entry that’s far more remarkable, satisfying, and fulfilling than most of its other recent ones have been.

The elevator pitch for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is fairly straightforward – they are almost exact 1:1 recreations of the original games, with no attempt to try and integrate them into the modern stylistic or design sensibilities the series has adopted since. This could sound like an incredibly unambitious undertaking – and it is – but it is also precisely what helps these new releases remain so much fun and engaging. You see, rather than make unnecessary changes to the pitch perfect design of the original games, or try to recreate them in the style of Sword and Shield, ILCA Inc., led by Game Freak, have simply opted to not mess with what works. Given that trying to recreate older games in newer styles has led to some pretty divisive remakes in the series in the past – OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire are both really good modern takes on the classics they are based on, but they end up sacrificing a lot that people loved about those originals in the process – this ends up working out really well here.

"The elevator pitch for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is fairly straightforward – they are almost exact 1:1 recreations of the original games, with no attempt to try and integrate them into the modern stylistic or design sensibilities the series has adopted since. This could sound like an incredibly unambitious undertaking – and it is – but it is also precisely what helps these new releases remain so much fun and engaging."

So, we end up with Sinnoh, still the best map in the series, replete with an incredible amount of aesthetic and geographic variation, brought over as is. And Sinnoh is an incredible map. It has everything – underground caverns, frozen and snowy tundras, marshes and swamps, forests, grasslands, deserts, coastal settings and beaches, mountains, small villages tucked out of the way, giant urban centers that are the center of life in the region. It’s a massive map, with the trip between any two destinations being extremely long, full of dense and massive routes, which make every time you step out feel like an actual journey and an actual adventure (something that, again, the modern games in the series lack). It’s also designed to give the player a lot of agency. While Sinnoh is laid out with a lock and key design to channel player progress along an intended critical path, it also offers a lot to the player who is willing to step off the beaten path and go traipsing on their own, whether that be encounters with relatively rare wild Pokemon, to entire areas and dungeons that are optional and hidden, just waiting for the enterprising player who might be willing to step off the road and follow the trail to where it leads.

Sinnoh is an adventure, and a great map and setting, and that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl bring it over as is without trying to, for example, recreate it in Sword and Shield‘s 3D style or as a Wild Area, works to these games’ benefit. As of right now, it is very clear that Game Freak does not properly understand how to design compelling 3D spaces – but they mastered the art of great design in 2D. So sticking to their best 2D map to date as is rather than trying to rebuild it in 3D was definitely a smart decision. 

In general, this means that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl end up with almost all of the same merits that the original games had. They’ve got that great map, as I mentioned, and the great sense of progression and adventure it brings; they also are ridiculously full of content. The fourth generation Pokemon games were frankly absurd with just how much they had to offer to players – you had an extremely long mainline campaign, you had online trading and battles, you had an extremely fleshed out Contests tournament you could lose dozens of hours to, you had massive minigames and meta-progression frameworks, from the Underground (which hosted Fossil hunting, secret bases, and spelunking for treasures) to poffin cooking, you had a fairly expansive post-game with an entire new island that opened up once you beat the Elite Four, and as mentioned, you had entire dungeons and areas that were totally optional, just lying there out of the way, for players who bothered to go explore them getting some pretty incredible rewards (such as a wicked encounter with a Legendary). All of that is here, almost as is.

There have been a few changes made, some for the better. The Underground is hugely expanded now (and it knows it, because it’s called the Grand Underground now) and plays host to everything it did in the originals, while also including caverns for encounters with higher leveled Pokemon, which can usually end up being stronger than ones you find in the wild, and also end up including some rare Pokemon you can’t find elsewhere. In a way, this helps address the issues of Pokemon availability in Sinnoh – famously, for example, the Sinnoh Dex did not offer any Fire type Pokemon until you beat the Pokemon League, unless you really liked Ponyta and Rapidash. That sort of gets addressed with the Grand Underground.

"In general, this means that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl end up with almost all of the same merits that the original games had. They’ve got that great map, and the great sense of progression and adventure it brings; they also are ridiculously full of content."

Other changes are decidedly for the worse – for instance, contests in Diamond and Pearl were a step down from how perfect they had been in Ruby and Sapphire (which introduced them), but they were still really compelling – they’ve been totally ruined in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl to just being a rhythm minigame. I’m sure a lot of people may still enjoy them, but I personally definitely found them to be a step down from the originals.

Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl also make the curious decision to eschew the content and improvements Pokemon Platinum (the much improved third version for Diamond and Pearl) made. This means that progression, mechanics, and the story all revert to how it was in the original pair of games. Which is extremely disappointing, to be clear, because so much of what Platinum brought to the table, from the improved story climax towards the end to the excellent post-game in the Battle Frontier, has needlessly been ignored. But to these games’ credit, they actually end up bringing a lot of their own alternate set of improvements to the table to compensate. Some of these are very basic QoL changes that can nonetheless have far reaching repercussions on how the games play moment to moment – such as the decision to not tie HMs (the hidden field moves you need to use to progress past obstacles) to the Pokemon you are carrying in your party, or the ability to customize your character (with some really great customization options offered to boot). Others bring back long requested features to the series – such as allowing the ability to have your Pokemon follow you in the overworld. They add an extremely substantial post-game, including allowing the ability to legally catch most Legendary Pokemon (but after completing some quests to get them first), as well as the ability to rebattle Gym Leaders, and the Elite 4 in extremely challenging encounters, where they have perfect team compositions, and AI dialled up to very difficult.

Actually, that’s another great area of improvement in these games. The original Gen 4 Pokemon games were fairly challenging. Like, they would never get mistaken for Dark Souls, but they did push back on the player a little, and some fights, such as Cynthia, were legendarily relentless if you went in unprepared. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl actually retain that aspect. Enemy AI, team compositions, and move pools are some of the best the series has seen, and fights can end up being fairly challenging as a result. Now, these buffs to the enemies are almost necessary, because the game retains the controversial EXP Share from Sword and Shield, which will give every Pokemon in your party EXP points after you finish a battle, regardless of whether or not they actually participated. There is, frustratingly enough, no way to turn it off either.

"The game retains the controversial EXP Share from Sword and Shield, which will give every Pokemon in your party EXP points after you finish a battle, regardless of whether or not they actually participated. There is, frustratingly enough, no way to turn it off either."

To the game’s credit, the EXP Share here feels better balanced than it has been in other games, but it can still be really easy to get really overleveled and trivialize a lot of the encounters in the game. Which is almost a shame, because as I mentioned, some of them are really well designed. It’s easy enough to circumvent the EXP Share gains – you can keep a rotating team of more than six Pokemon at a time, and keep swapping them in and out to basically have a bigger roster you are working from. And to be fair, I ended up enjoying using a lot of Pokemon I have never used before because of this. But again, I would much rather have made that choice for myself, rather than being forced into it because the game was handing out so much EXP that the only way to maintain challenge for a lot of it was to resort to workarounds like these. Game Freak already had the perfect solution to this problems through to Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, which let you turn off the EXP Share if you didn’t want it (but left it on by default) – why not just offer players that option again?

Even with a lot of the encounters in the game being trivialized, however, the late game ones hit hard, with the Elite Four and Champion battles in particular being extremely challenging, and the post-game battles being the best NPC battles the series has seen. It’s just really a shame that so much of the good work that must have surely gone into designing these encounters has been unnecessarily compromised by this insistence on not offering players options.

There are some other problems. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are actually the buggiest Pokemon releases we have had in a while. They aren’t anything game breakingly bad, but you’ll often see random stuff like textures not loading, or characters getting stuck in the geometry (a consequence of adding full analog movement to a grid based map without properly accounting for it, I guess), sound randomly cutting out, or even just outright crashes. The good news is, the game has a really aggressive autosave, so you never really lose a lot of progress when this does happen – it’s just a shame it happens at all. A day one patch has already made things better, but there’s still a long way to go, and hopefully ILCA and Game Freak continue patching the game, because while Pokemon games have never been paragons of good programming, they at least don’t let their messy coding get in the way of the player’s experience too much. Right now, that’s decidedly not the case, and while none of these glitches and bugs are too frustrating, that doesn’t really absolve their existence to begin with.

There are three other points I want to discuss, one extremely positive, one bafflingly negative, and one mixed. So let’s start with the negative one, because to be fair it’s also the most minor one. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl have frustratingly patchy touch screen support. Which is almost hilarious because the original games pioneered touch input for Pokemon to begin with, but that’s where we are. Touch input is supported for the Poketch smartwatch, and in some random and arbitrary areas such as for polishing up your gym badges, or minigames such as digging out treasure in the Grand Underground. But it’s not supported for input in battles or menus, and that’s almost the whole game. 

This isn’t a major problem, but it’s baffling – why is touch screen support so inconsistent and patchy? For example, I mentioned above that minigames like digging for treasures in the Underground support touch input. But poffin cooking, on the other hand, does not. Why? Why not at least be consistent within the limited scope of touch input implementation you did decide on? It’s just so unnecessarily confusing. Again, none of this is a major issue, because touch input is at best a convenience, and you get used to its absence in like three seconds. It’s just a curious and bemusing point of interest.

"The soundtrack for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remixes one of the best, most atmospheric set of tunes this series has ever had expertly. Almost every remix is a slam dunk."

Far more positive, and this one is for something substantially more important, are my impressions of the soundtrack. Patched in with the massive 8GB day 1 update, the soundtrack for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl remixes one of the best, most atmospheric set of tunes this series has ever had expertly. Almost every remix is a slam dunk. I am sure there will be some changes that some don’t like, variously; I myself am disappointed with at least two songs’ remixes – but on the whole, the music here is a resounding triumph. Plus, much like HeartGold and SoulSilver (the beloved remakes of the equally beloved Gold and Silver), these games unlock the ability to play the original soundtrack later in the game as well – for those who simply prefer the sound of the DS games over the remixes.

As positive as I am on the soundtrack, I am more mixed on how the game looks. Now to be clear, I don’t think it necessarily looks bad – it definitely looks better than it did pre-launch, and I am a fan of the chibi style aesthetic for Pokemon, particularly when done well. In Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, it can help create a real sense of place for Sinnoh as well (particularly when paired with some gorgeous and extremely detailed battle backgrounds, which always include Mount Coronet towering in the background). But at the same time, I’m not sure I’m the biggest fan of how this game has done the chibi thing. I think something like the Pokemon Let’s Go look would have been the way to go for these games. By retaining super deformed character models that are decidedly not to scale, these games end up looking weird a lot of the time – particularly when the camera makes the misguidedly confident decision to zoom in on characters for close ups in an unfounded burst of cinematic confidence. This doesn’t happen often enough, but whenever it happens, it highlights how ugly the characters look – which is perplexing because the environments look cozy and great, and the battle backgrounds are gorgeous. It’s a mixed bag, as far as the visuals go.

In spite of a lot of missteps and unforced, unnecessary errors, however, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are excellent outings. By eschewing a lot of the modern design sensibilities the series imbibes, and hewing so faithfully and closely to the fifteen year old game often regarded to be as one of the series’ high points, they end up delivering an uncontroversial, safe, but incredibly fulfilling and compelling Pokemon adventure, the best one we’ve had in years. Perhaps there is something to be said about what it means for the Pokemon games that their best game in almost a decade is essentially an almost totally faithful 1:1 port of a fifteen year old DS game, and that’s definitely a discussion that needs to be and should be had. But this isn’t a review of the Pokemon series, it’s a review of just this one game. And this one game, by choosing to be unambitious and sticking with what has been known to work, delivers undoubtedly one of the best outings Pokemon has had in years – warts and all. May it remind Game Freak and The Pokemon Company why players fell in love with this series to begin with.

This game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A new Pokemon Presents is coming up today and rumors have been running amuck about remakes for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl being announced for the Switch. Reddit user PracticalBrush12 – who leaked announcements for Monster Hunter Rise, Diablo 4 and Diablo 2: Resurrected – has revealed some apparent new details on the same. They’re called Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl with the art-style being a “weird chibi 3D.”

Battles will apparently be the same as Pokemon Sword and Shield but perhaps more interesting is that ILCA will be developing it, not GameFreak. The company has worked on titles like Code Vein, NieR: Automata and Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age. More recently, it saw former Monster Hunter World: Iceborne director Daisuke Ichihara joining its Kyoto division in December 2020.

But that’s not all. A new open world Pokemon game is also in development. It’s being handled by GameFreak and will be set in feudal Sinnoh. Starter Pokemon will apparently be a mix of three generations. The title is slated to release in 2022 for the Switch.

Take this all with a grain of salt obviously but so far, PracticalBrush12 has been on the money with previous leaks. The Pokemon Presents stream goes live at 7 AM PDT so stay tuned for more details later today.

With the first three generations of Pokemon games having received remakes, series fans have been waiting for remakes of Gen 4 games Pokemon Diamond and Pearl for a while now, and recent rumours have suggested that those are on the horizon. Centro Pokemon reported last month that according to their sources, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl remakes would be announced in celebration of the series’ 25th anniversary this year.

Pokemon’s 25th anniversary celebrations are happening this Saturday, February 27, which is the date Pokemon Red and Blue originally released for the Game Boy in Japan in 1996. However, it seems the announcement for the Diamond and Pearl remakes will be made before that. Centro Pokemon recently took to Twitter to state that the announcement would be made during the week, and that fans wouldn’t have to wait until Pokemon Day on February 27.

As always, it’s best to take this with a grain of salt, and with no way to verify the information just yet, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens during the week. Stay tuned, and we’ll keep you updated should we learn anything else.

No van a tener que aguantar hasta el Pokémon Day el 27 de febrero para las grandes noticias que han estado esperando.

Nos vemos la próxima semana. pic.twitter.com/wNtWg9XKjm

— Centro Pokémon (@CentroPokemon) February 18, 2021

2021 marks the 25th anniversary of Pokemon, and it seems Nintendo and The Pokemon Company will be celebrating that by releasing the heavily demanded remakes of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, 15 years after the original duo released for the Nintendo DS. That’s as per a recent leak by Centro Pokemon.

As per the aforementioned leak, the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl remakes will be releasing exclusively for the Nintendo Switch later this year, with Nintendo and The Pokemon Company planning on revealing the project as early as next month.

A recent leak by known Pokemon insider Kelios suggested that there would be a Pokemon Direct next month, on February 25th, to celebrate Pokemon Day (which is the series’ 25th anniversary), and this would certainly fall in line with that. Kelios also states on Twitter that the Diamond and Pearl remakes won’t be in the style of 2018’s Pokemon Let’s Go games, which is something that Centro Pokemon corroborates as well. Apparently, the games will be traditional Pokemon titles with proper capturing mechanics.

Additionally, Centro Pokemon also points out on Twitter that the domain diamondpearl.pokemon.com is now active. Heading to the domain gives you a 403 error, which means that the domain is active, but access to its content has been blocked by the domain holder. In comparison, heading to something like, say, blackwhite.pokemon.com or rubysapphire.pokemon.com simply tells you that the site cannot be reached- since those domains don’t exist.

It’s best, as always, to take these leaks with a grain of salt for now. By the end of this year, it’ll be two years since the last mainline Pokemon release, and remakes for Diamond and Pearl have been long overdue, but as much as connecting the dots makes sense right now, it’s best to temper expectations and wait for official announcements.

Stay tuned, and we’ll keep you updated should we learn anything more.

We can now confirm that Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl are coming this year to Nintendo Switch. https://t.co/QB66iVt75t

— Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) January 14, 2021

BREAKING NEWShttps://t.co/k0pis7BdYV domain has been enabled https://t.co/9NyIMbRzAl

— Centro Pokémon (@CentroPokemon) January 14, 2021

"It's not a Let's GO game", en même temps s'ils font un remake pour la première fois, ils vont pas le faire à la sauce Let's GO, ça n'aurait pas de sens <.<

— Kelios (@KeliosFR) January 14, 2021

Note: There are spoilers ahead for every game we talk about. If you see us beginning to talk about a game you don’t want spoiled, skip ahead to the next entry.

THE STRANGER (GOD OF WAR)

Kratos is a man who’s killed everything that can be killed. He’s killed hydras and krakens and gigantic minotaurs, he’s killed the Colossus of Rhodes and the mythical Medusa. He’s killed the likes of Zeus, Ares, and Poseidon in their ethereal forms. Flipping hell, he even killed Cronos, a character so big, the screen could literally not fit his entire body, and Kratos looked like little more than a pixel in comparison. There isn’t much – or anything – that you look at and think to yourself, “maybe Kratos will have trouble killing this thing/person”. Especially not when, at the beginning of God of War (2018), this lanky dude with tattoos walks up to Kratos’ front door, and then proceeds to hurl insults at him, provoke him, hit him, threaten him and his son. All the while, you’re thinking, “this dude is asking for trouble. Kratos is going to turn him inside out and wear him like a coat”. And then the Stranger goes full Super Saiyan, and turns out to be more than just a thorn in Kratos’ side.

The Pokemon games might not necessarily be as celebrated for their music as, say, The Legend of Zelda, Super Smash Bros., or Final Fantasy, but the music in these games still plays a crucial role in setting the mood and atmosphere and is almost always uniformly excellent. Now, following the soundtracks to Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver, and Pokemon X and Y all being made available on iTunes, The Pokemon Company has announced that the soundtrack for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl will be available on iTunes as well.

This digitally remastered collection, entitled Pokémon Diamond & Pokémon Pearl: Super Music Collection features beautifully re-orchestrated music originally composed by Junichi Masuda, Gō Ichinose, and Morikazu Aoki- the jazzy music was, and still remains, unlike anything else in the Pokemon series, and it gave the Sinnoh games their own distinct musical identity.

Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were released for the Nintendo DS back in 2006 in Japan, and 2007 in the rest of the world, and they were massive hits, representing a stunning comeback for the franchise that had been in decline in the Gameboy Advance era; their worldwide sales stood at roughly 18 million units sold, and they were swiftly followed by Pokemon Platinum, Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver, Pokemon Black and White, and Pokemon Black 2 and White 2, all on the DS.

The Pokemon Company promises that the soundtracks to the Pokemon Black and White games will be uploaded to iTunes soon as well.